Dense Pixel LCD delivers 200 dpi

It isn’t quite as easy to spot interesting products in the Developer’s Showcase at IDF. For one thing, Intel controls the booth layout and designs, so there’s little of the flashing lights, loud sounds and sensory overload of some trade shows. Still, you can come across some interesting gems. Here’s one.

This 22.2-inch LCD panel being sold by Viewsonic uses the same panel developed and marketed by IBM last year. The difference is that IBM charged nearly $20,000 for its version; Viewsonic plans on selling this one for around $8,000. That’s still pretty pricey — what makes this panel so special?

Try 9.2 million pixels, for one thing. This 16×9 aspect panel has a native resolution of 3840×2400 pixels. That translates to roughly 200 dots per inch. In fact, you have to put your nose up to the screen to really notice the pixels. Scanned topographical maps could be easily read, even down to the smallest typeface. The monitor is targeted towards specialized image processing and CAD applications, and offers a 400:1 contrast ratio. Driving 9.2 megapixels requires a graphics card with twin TMDS transmitters.

Viewsonic also had on display a more mundane 17-inch panel with native resolution of 1280×768 pixels (16:10 aspect ratio). It ships in November, and will come with a breakout box with an NTSC TV tuner, composite, S-video and component video inputs. It also has the circuitry to handle picture-in-a-picture.

A bit further along down the show floor, Moving on, we ran into Brian Bruning, former developer relations honcho at 3dfx. He’s now CEO of Fathammer, a company developing compact 3D gaming engines for portable devices, such as cell phones and PDAs. The engine is written in very low-level code, but is architected to interfaces well with C++ code. We played with a couple of games on newly released cell phones from Nokia and Sony/Ericsson. Graphics quality was somewhat limited — mostly flat shaded polygons with spot texture mapping in some areas. On the PocketPC, we checked out a demo of more robust graphics, including some lighting effects.

It eerily similar to the early days of computer gaming. Bruning acknowledged challenges akin to those of the early days, with multiple target platforms, tight memory requirements and a restricted CPU budget. However, new phones are at least being engineered with gaming in mind, with trackpad-like pointing devices and larger color screens. Bruning figures the killer gaming app in the short term will be playing against other people in small areas over bluetooth, which offers better latencies than trying to play over the a wide-area networknet, even on a 3G-enabled network. However, the biggest challenge may be the business model — selling games to phone subscribers may be an uphill battle, yet and there are only so many embedded OEM opportunities.

Closing in on 5GHz

During the opening keynote, Intel demonstrated a PC running reliably at 4.1GHz. Then they proceeded to dial up the clock rate until the system crashed — at 4.7GHz. This was on a 0.13 micron processor, though Intel didn’t specify if it was Northwood or some future CPU.

Another on-stage demo revolved around upcoming hyperthreading support for the Pentium 4 CPU. The upcoming 3.06GHz CPU will have hyperthreading turned on. The demo revolved around running multiple, simultaneous CPU-intensive applications. Of course, the hyperthreaded CPU always did better. We’ll delve more in-depth on possible benefits — and pitfalls — of hyperthreading when we test the next P4.

Wilfred Pinfold, Technology Director for Intel’s Microprocessor Architecture Lab, suggests that the future belongs to multi-threaded applications. It will take time for developers to fully convert to a threaded approach, but hyperthreading will get the ball rolling. Most desktop applications are currently not multithreaded. With huge transistor counts possible in future products, on-die multiprocessing will eventually arrive. Developers need to realize this, and new applications need to be threaded.

For more information about Intel’s Fall Developer’s Forum, head over to our special report, we’re updating it constantly all week during the show, from September 9th, 2002 through September 13th, 2002.

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